Looking into getting a new NAS for myself for a few purposes:1) Backup storage of my Windows PC, and my girl friend's MacBook (circa 2007 I believe, running Mac OS 10.5)2) Media storage, particularly MP4 and AVI video files, allowing them to be streamed to my XBox 360 and a future HTPC (probably running Windows w/ XBMC). Currently the files are being stored on my personal system and being shared with the XBox using TVersity due the the transcoding needed for the MP4 files to play.

Anyone have any suggestions? Looking at either a 4 or 5 bay unit. And from the looks of things, many of them are starting to do DLNA serving with onboard transcoding so I won't need a separate system to stream them to the xbox. Curious if anyone has used these functions, and how well they work at various resolutions (720p, 1080p, etc.)

Well I love my DLink DNS-323 for about all the things you look to be doing with yours. I'm a big fan of the ease and interface ( and modability ). If the 4 bay DNS-343 is anything like the 2 bay, I'd say it's a good bet.

I've been using a ReadyNAS NV+ for 3 or 4 years. I've gone through expanding the array and replacing bad drives without issue. My only complaints are that it is slow (12MB/s), due to lack of RAM and slow CPU, and an annoying fan that seems to creep up to 3000 RPMs on occasion forcing me to make it re-calibrate.

I'm interested too in recommendations as I want something faster and quieter.

I would suggest looking at Qnap too. I have one that I'm very happy with, and also get decent speeds from, 30MB/s+. And the management gui is pretty snappy, which is nice and one reason why I will stay far away from ReadyNAS for all future.

I cant attest for the dlna sharing ability of the qnap though because I only use my NAS as a pure backup drive for my fileserver(netting 120MB/s+ on my gig network, which is pretty much full utilization) which also does all DLNA sharing.

I have to recommend the Netgear ReadyNAS as a basic solution. There's plenty of support for it and it has loads of functionality for a good price. It is pretty slow unless you use Jumbo frames though, and even then it's not exactly a speed demon.

If you have more budget, the Qnaps are generally highly rated but I don't have much experience with them.

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